Fables About Chaos
2018
(Installations)
Text by Andres Burbano - Curator of the exhibition
Every philosophizer should build an Ant Farm. It is a marvelous hands on demonstration of emergence. The reversibility of many Ant paths leads to a direct awareness of the paradox of the Arrow of Time. John Horton Conway.
Algorithms, that is, the methods through which computers process data and model physical processes, are actively present in many of our daily practices. From taking a picture with a cell phone, searching for something in a search engine or receiving ads when browsing a social network, to planning a route in a public transport vehicle. These actions, or agencies, executed by the software tend to happen invisibly (are naturalized quickly), generating a level of suspicious technological transparency.
This naturalization needs to be questioned in a profound way in the contemporary world and one of the privileged vehicles to do so is art itself, in particular those forms of experimentation with means that are able to use these algorithms just to be able to see them in another way, in order to be able to questioning them, thus showing the understanding of them. Making the algorithms make their wealth evident through a series of sensory and conceptual translations, of strings of bits and bytes that become visualizations, sonifications, even spatializations of data and programs.
The fact that mathematical models from fields such as Theory of Chaos shows us that many of the phenomena that surround us and that constitute us at a vital level can in fact be described at an abstract level and then formalized as algorithms, makes evident the weak line that separates the natural from the artistic. Perhaps, in the last instance, he reaffmerce that the same nature has a computational contabilidad, introducción, or to say it with Benjamin H. Bratton, the computer was not invented but discovered.
"Fables about chaos" explores in depth the concepts of order and chaos, from a creative and analytical perspective, which recalls the best
res moments of the work of Hans H. Diebner and his idea of Performative Science. There is nothing of this exhibition that can be anticipated, it is the fruit of a collective work and of the investigation of the field of interaction of art and technology, the former framed in a physical dialogue with the architectural space that enriches the echoes of spatiality and meaning.
Thus, the vocabulary of the exhibition oscillates between simplicity and complexity, and asks about the emergency that can be understood just as the transition of the interaction between simple rules and complex processes. In this exhibition, the movement of an ant, the trickle of water, the movement of the strings, the oscillation of the pendulum and the falling water of a waterfall, among others, suggesting a dialogue through experience between the algorithm and the matter, between the physical and the computational, between the abstract and the concrete.
